The Wolfson Prize–winning author of The Dictators offers this remarkable analysis of how the fear of war shaped modern England. Britain had become a laboratory for modernity after World War I—thinkers and artists like Arnold Toynbee, Aldous Huxley, and H.G. Wells sought a vision for a rapidly changing world, amid eugenics, Freud's psychoanalysis, and a creeping fear that the West was staring down the end of civilization. Richard Overy examines the paradox of this period and argues that the coming of World War II was almost welcomed by Britain's leading thinkers, who saw it as an extraordinary test for the survival of civilization and a way of resolving their contradictory fears and hopes about the future.